Originally, call distribution facilities were generally implemented in the form of specialized equipment designed to be associated with telephone exchanges in order to enable callers to be put into communication telephonically with agents for answering their requests. Subsequently, it has become commonplace to integrate such facilities which often include a large software content, in telephone exchanges, and in particular in private type exchanges made available to users, e.g. businesses where the users are often employees or clients.
Such facilities enable numerous businesses to provide information and service on request in very refined individualized and possibly personalized manners; as a result, they contribute to the image given to the outside world of a business running such a facility.
Naturally, the primary function of a call distribution facility is to route the calls of telephone callers to agents, in human or machine form, for the purpose of taking them into account and/or answering them, at least in part.
Various criteria can be involved in the operations designed to cause a call to be distributed to an agent by such a facility, and it is common practice to take account of the caller concerned, the purpose of the call, and/or the time that the caller has already waited on a particular call. These criteria are used by the distribution facility and/or by the personnel running and/or supervising the facility so that the most appropriate possible response is given to each call as a function of the needs of callers, and in particular the needs of callers having a call in progress at that time and the available resources for processing by human or by machine.
Naturally speed of response is an essential element that such a facility must take into account insofar as such speed of response is one of the elements having the most direct effect on caller appreciation of the service provided by the facility and the departments it serves, with this element being largely responsible for the impression of satisfaction or dissatisfaction felt by users.
This leads to distribution facilities being organized in such a manner as to have different queues enabling callers to be distributed as a function of agent availability, with callers being given priorities as a function of how long their respective calls have been waiting and/or criteria related to the callers themselves, providing there is some way in which callers can be identified selectively when they call. Nevertheless, such facilities necessarily have limits and they do not always perform satisfactorily, particularly during periods of high calling traffic, and as a result waiting times can lengthen for certain unlucky callers. As in any traffic that is insufficiently supervised, localized overloads can arise which then penalize some of the callers waiting for a reply because they are in a queue that is temporarily blocked, whereas other queues can exist simultaneously that are lightly loaded and that could serve those callers.
This has also led to facilities in which the various processes that may be performed on the occasion of a call are split up into sequences of operations that are organized in modular manner and that make it possible to perform redistribution at various stages in the processing.
Nevertheless, the various facilities mentioned above are not really satisfactory insofar as they do not provide sufficient information, particularly in the event of potential or actual overloading, thus preventing the operator from having an overall view sufficiently in advance, which leads to callers being dissatisfied when they are poorly served and sometimes left hanging on without any relevant information, in the event of call processing being abnormally delayed. Unfortunately, as already mentioned, the conditions under which such facilities run contribute very greatly to the image of the business running the facilities and of the services they are providing in the eyes of the people using those services.